The soundtrack to Disney’s Frozen 2 crept to Number One on the Rolling Stone Top 200 Albums chart this week. The film has topped the weekend box office for three consecutive weeks and brought in more than $900 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. The accompanying soundtrack features songs written by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, and it has attracted an impressively balanced listenership: Fans appear equally content buying the album (more than 32,000 sales last week) or streaming it (more than 42 million streams).
The week after Thanksgiving was a quiet one for new releases, so Frozen 2‘s 77,100 album-equivalent units was more than enough to propel it to the top of the chart. Behind it on the RS 200 were a pair of former Number Ones, Taylor Swift’s Lover (more than 67,000 album-equivalent units) and Post Malone’s Hollywood’s Bleeding (66,400).
The Rolling Stone 200 Albums chart tracks the most popular releases of the week in the United States. Entries are ranked by album units, a number that combines digital and physical album sales, digital song sales, and audio streams using a custom weighting system. The chart does not include passive listening such as terrestrial radio or digital radio. The Rolling Stone 200 Albums chart is updated daily, and each week Rolling Stone finalizes and publishes an official version of the chart, covering the seven-day period ending with the previous Thursday.
Only two new albums debuted in the Top 40 on the latest RS 200. Summertime Shootout 3: Coldest Summer Ever, a new set from veteran New York rapper Fabolous, arrived at Number Six with 42.8 million streams. In addition, an expansive reissue of Prince’s 1999 arrived at Number 31 thanks to more than 12,000 album sales after the release of a deluxe reissue.
In place of exciting new albums, this week’s chart was heavy on Christmas stalwarts. Michael Buble’s Christmas led the pack at Number Seven. He was followed closely by Pentatonix’s The Best of Pentatonix Christmas, Mariah Carey’s Merry Christmas, Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, Vince Guaraldi’s A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Nat King Cole’s The Christmas Song, all of which charted in the Top 25.
